"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

The list of murders laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin has gotten so long now that you need a chart to keep track of them.That’s just what the Association of Former Intelligence Officers produced in a recent edition of its quarterly bulletin, The Intelligencer.
To be sure, AFIO, which represents 4,500 former CIA, FBI and military
intelligence veterans, is steeped in Cold War hatred for the Kremlin.
But even if its chart
were off by half, the list of Moscow’s suspected victims would be
grimly impressive: There are 40 names on the list assembled by Peter C.
Oleson, a former assistant director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.Oleson put together his list before longtime Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza fell deathly ill from poison last week in a Moscow hospital. And before a former KGB general, Oleg Erovinkin, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow the day after Christmas. Erovinkin was suspected of being a source for Christopher Steele, the ex-British intelligence officer who assembled the notorious “golden shower” memorandum
on alleged connections between President Donald Trump’s camp and the
Russian president. After Steele was unmasked as the author of the
dossier, he went into hiding. He may well have had the fate of other
Kremlin critics in mind.“I sympathize with him. I wouldn't want to stick around,” Oleson told Newsweek in a January telephone interview. “Mind you, I'm not sure whether he's hiding from the Russians or just hiding from the press."But considering the sheer number of dissidents, defectors,
journalists, disaffected former Putin cronies and rivals who have died
under suspicious circumstances since the former KGB colonel first came
to power 18 years ago, Steele’s precaution is well founded, he said.
“One or two or three, you could always explain away, but dozens? You
have to say, ‘No, they're not innocent deaths here,’" Oleson said.Through the years, poison has felled many a Kremlin critic, as
Oleson’s list shows. On February 2, Kara-Murza, a former Washington,
D.C.-based television correspondent active in Russian liberal opposition
parties and movements since Putin's rise, was hospitalized. His wife
told reporters the diagnosis was "acute poisoning by an undetermined
substance." It was the second time that Kara-Murza, 35, had mysteriously
fallen ill. The first time was in 2015, the same year his friend Boris Nemtsov, a prominent opposition, was cut down by an assassin’s bullet just outside the Kremlin walls.Related: Trump, Russian spies and the infamous 'golden shower' memosObservers were quick to compare Kara-Murza’s misfortune to that of Alexander Litvinenko,
a disenchanted former Russian security agent poisoned to death by
radioactive polonium-210 in London in 2006. “You may succeed in
silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said as he
lay dying. “…The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate,
Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”

Indeed, Scotland Yard leveled a finger at the Kremlin for the
murder of Litvinenko, saying “the evidence suggests that the only
credible explanation is in one way or another the Russian state is
involved in Litvinenko's murder.” Britain demanded Moscow extradite the
alleged perpetrator, Andrey Lugovoy, to stand trial for the murder, but
the Kremlin declined. Lugovoy, who called reports of his responsibility
in Litvinenko’s death nothing but “invention, supposition, rumors,” now
has a seat in the Duma, which provides him immunity from prosecution.Litvinenko, who British intelligence was supporting while he did
private work for a business risk-analysis firm, was said to be
investigating Spanish links to the Russian mafia when Lugovoy, a former
KGB bodyguard, allegedly slipped the polonium into his tea. The context
of his murder is plumbed in a heart-pounding new book on the affair, A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West, by British journalist Luke Harding.“Litvinenko wasn't exactly James Bond,” writes Harding, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Guardian
newspaper. “But he was passing British intelligence sensitive
information about the links between Russia mafia gangs active in Europe
and powerful people at the very top of Russian power—including Putin.”
All together, Litvinenko would say, the Russian president, his ministers
and their mobster pals composed what could only be called “a mafia
state.” Or, as Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly put it to President Donald Trump the other day, “He’s a killer.”“There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump said
in a remark that seemed to defend Putin and drew widespread rebukes.
Then again, he may be talking from experience in his rough-edged New
York real estate world, where he rubbed elbows with labor union
mobsters, according to several published reports, and he's repeatedly expressed his deep loathing for reporters. "I hate some of these people. But I'd never kill them,” he said at a 2015 rally.Even if he were tempted to give in to his loathing, he’d have a
long way to go to catch up to what the Kremlin boss is suspected of.Of course, it’s been impossible to prove Putin had a hand in any of
the nearly 40 deaths he or his cronies are suspected of carrying out.
But there are just so many untimely demises of Russian dissidents,
journalists and others that AFIO’s Oleson decided to include them all in
his list, no matter that foul play was ruled out in some. One such is
the odd death of former Putin crony Mikhail Lesin in a Washington, D.C.
hotel room in November 2015. Some accounts speculated that he “may have
been talking to the FBI to avoid corruption charges,” Oleson notes.
Police ultimately decided he stumbled and died from acute alcohol
poisoning.“I still have a question in my mind, not that I'm overly
suspicious, but he would have been a prime candidate for this kind of
attempt, given what he was doing and what Putin has shown that he has
done with others,” Oleson said. “You have to wonder.”Kara-Murza was still suffering from the effects of his 2015
poisoning—nerve damage on his left side that caused him to walk with a
cane—when he fell ill again last week. As with that earlier incident,
his doctors say they can’t pin down exactly what put him in the hospital
again. His wife said she has sent samples of her husband’s blood, hair
and fingernails to a private laboratory in Israel for analysis.In a 2015 interview, Kara-Murza said the likely culprit in his
poisoning was a "very sophisticated" substance that typically only the
Kremlin’s security services would have access to. Meanwhile, he has
powerful American friends looking out for him. One of them is Senator
John McCain of Arizona. On Tuesday, the Republican lawmaker took to the Senate floor
to defend his Russian friend and denounce Trump for equating Putin’s
murders with some unidentified killings that the president suggested the
United States had carried out.Kara-Murza "knew that there was no moral equivalence between the
United States and Putin's Russia,” McCain fumed. “I repeat, there is no
moral equivalence between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel and the
United States of America.... To allege some kind of moral equivalence
between the two is either terribly misinformed or incredibly biased.”
Oleson’s list makes the point. The harshest critic of the United States could never come up with anything like it